The Good Nurse and the Banality of a Killer Next Door
Hannah Arendt's 'banality of evil' fits Charles Cullen disturbingly well: a mild, likable nurse who kept killing for years while hospitals looked away.
Have you ever imagined being at your weakest, lying in a hospital bed, placing blind trust in the person holding the bag of medication, only to discover later that this “angel” caring for you is one of the most dangerous serial killers in your country’s history? The Good Nurse is a genuinely terrifying true story about Charles Cullen, the nurse who confessed to killing dozens, while estimates suggest he killed hundreds, all of it happening right under the nose of the medical system.
The banality of evil, on screen
The philosopher Hannah Arendt coined a brilliant term: “the banality of evil.” What does that mean? It means the villain isn’t necessarily a horned monster laughing an evil laugh. The villain can be a perfectly ordinary person, kind, calm, and loving toward his children. And that’s exactly what actor Eddie Redmayne delivered in the role of Charlie.
Charlie appears at the start of the film as the perfect friend to the protagonist, Amy (Jessica Chastain). A decent nurse, he helps her through night shifts, plays with her kids, and guards the secret of her illness with his whole heart. The horror lies in the question: how can this gentle person inject IV bags with insulin to slowly kill patients while eating pizza? The film tells us killers don’t look like monsters — they look exactly like us.
There’s a genuine discomfort here, too, and it deserves acknowledgment rather than a quick dismissal. A film this committed to Redmayne’s soft-spoken, wounded version of Cullen risks tipping into something like sympathy for a man who killed patients entrusted to his care, and more than a few critics raised exactly that concern on release. But the discomfort is arguably the point rather than a flaw in execution. Arendt’s own argument was never that evil deserves sympathy, only that refusing to see the ordinary humanity in people who do monstrous things makes the next one harder to catch, because everyone keeps expecting a monster to look the part.
Amy Loughren’s moral courage
On the other side, we have Amy, an embodiment of the real nurse Amy Loughren’s story. Amy isn’t a trained officer, and she doesn’t carry a gun. She’s a single mother with a serious heart condition that could kill her at any moment, working herself to exhaustion just to keep her health insurance. She represents “moral courage.” While the police couldn’t extract a confession from Charlie, and while the hospitals covered for him, Amy was the only one who risked her life and her friendship to expose the truth. Her weapon was empathy. She was the only one who could get the monster to talk, because she treated him as a human being until the very last moment.
The mechanics of how Cullen was finally stopped matter, too, because they weren’t glamorous. Detectives didn’t crack the case with a dramatic interrogation; they needed a colleague he trusted to get close enough to draw out an admission, which meant Amy agreeing to wear a wire while still working alongside a man she had genuinely cared about. The film treats that moment with the right amount of dread, because it wasn’t heroism in the movie sense. It was a sick, exhausted woman doing something quietly unbearable because nobody else in a position of institutional power was willing to.
Institutional corruption
The film raises a terrifying idea that goes beyond Charlie’s individual crimes: “institutional corruption.” The real story and the film both reveal a shocking truth: Charles Cullen worked at 9 hospitals over 16 years. Many of these hospitals suspected him and found evidence he’d tampered with medication. What did they do? Did they call the police? No. They fired him and gave him good references so he could work at another hospital!
That pattern has an uncomfortable specificity behind it. Hospitals kept declining to report their suspicions to law enforcement because doing so exposed them to liability and bad publicity, while quietly passing Cullen along solved their immediate problem at someone else’s future expense. That isn’t a plot device invented to make institutions look worse than they were. It’s closer to what investigators actually found once they started pulling personnel files after his arrest, a chain of hospitals that each independently decided silence was cheaper than accountability, year after year, without ever comparing notes with one another.
Nothing about that failure is unique to one decade or one hospital chain. Understaffed wards, malpractice-averse legal departments, and a chronic reluctance to trust a colleague’s suspicion over a clean resume are still standard features of large institutions, medical or otherwise. The Good Nurse isn’t really a period piece about one bad stretch in New Jersey and Pennsylvania hospitals. It’s a warning about what any organization will quietly choose when protecting itself costs less than protecting the people it serves, and about how rarely that choice ever gets revisited until someone outside the system forces the question.
